Four years ago 4RG and other climate change NGOs sponsored “Sleepwalking to Catastrophe”, a Climate Change Forum. Alanna Mitchell, the author of “Sea Sick”, was one of the panellists. She told us that the great coral reefs of the world were facing extinction.
Alanna’s message was dramatic, but factual: Global Warming was the culprit. The world had little time in which to reverse the trend to extinction.
If you want to see her presentation, go to our video “The Inescapable Lies Before Us”.
Australia, where on some reefs 100 per cent of the corals are snow white, has a National Coral Bleaching Task Force. Terry Hughes, an Australian professor who heads this Task Force, said that part of the Great Barrier Reef “is absolutely blitzed,”.
In the past, El Nino warming of the Pacific Ocean didn’t cause such mass bleaching events in Australia. But the effects of recent, major El Ninos have coincided with water that’s already warmer because of man-made climate change. “The link between bleaching and global warming is incontrovertible,” Hughes said.
So now it is too late. The increase in ocean temperatures is killing off the coral reefs. The Great Barrier Reef is “on death watch”. It is just a matter of time.
And remember, there are species of fish that depend upon a coral habitat. They will be gone too.
The world is still “Sleepwalking to Catastrophe”.
(The photo, provided by the University of Victoria. shows a half-healthy, half-bleached small stony Porites coral, which is the type of coral that is doing the best at Kiritimati, an island in the Western Pacific. (Danielle Claar/University of Victoria via Associated Press)
(If you would like your own free copy of “The Inescapable Lies Before Us” send us a request by email to contactus@forourgrandchildren.ca giving the address to which we are to send the DVD.)
